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Anne Zieger is veteran healthcare editor and analyst with 25 years of industry experience. Zieger formerly served as editor-in-chief of FierceHealthcare.com and her commentaries have appeared in dozens of international business publications, including Forbes, Business Week and Information Week. She has also contributed content to hundreds of healthcare and health IT organizations, including several Fortune 500 companies. She can be reached at @ziegerhealth or www.ziegerhealthcare.com.

While hospitals buy EMRs to improve their operations – both clinically and financially – too often they take a hit before they work out the kinks in their installation. In fact, healthcare institutions often end up losing up to 5 percent of their gross revenue after EMRs are implemented, according to consultant Erick McKesson.

One typical story comes from Maine Medical Center, which found that patient charges weren’t appearing after its $150 million Epic installation in 2012. These billing errors were one of the reasons the medical center posted a $13.4 million loss in the first six months after the installation, hospital executives reported.

But according to McKesson, managing consultant with Navigant, it’s possible to overcome these problems. In an article for Becker’s Hospital Review, he tells the story of a group of health systems which worked together to avoid such losses. The group worked together to identify the most valuable software features that flagged mischarges or reporting errors. They then identified the five charge program “edits” which had the largest financial impact.

Areas the cooperating health systems considered the most important included:

* Administrative codes

The health systems noted that incorrect administrative codes lead to lagging revenue. That’s particularly the case when there are different codes for the same procedure. Hospitals need to be sure that clinicians use the higher code if appropriate, which can be helped by the right technological fixes.

* Anesthesia

It’s important to monitor your charges when there are two distinct aspects of a single procedure that are charged separately, particularly with anesthesia services. If your audit system flags the absence of the added codes, it can recapture a substantial level of missing revenue.

* CT

Seeing to it that radiology charges are automatically reviewed can ensure that appropriate levels of revenue are generated. For example, in the case of CT exams, it’s important to see that charges are assessed for both the exam and if needed, the use of a contrast agent.

* Emergency Department

It’s not unusual for ED physicians to undercode high-acuity patients. But it’s important to address this issue, as undercoding can result in significant financial consequences. Not only that, in addition to generating financial losses, undercoding can create problems with performance-based reimbursement contracts. If patients are depicted as less acute than they actually are, payors may expect better outcomes than the patients are likely to have. And that can lead to lower revenue or even significant financial penalties.

* Infusions

Auditing infusion charges can be very helpful in capturing added revenues, given that they are one of the most frequent charges in healthcare. Infusion codes are very complex, including the need to track start and stop times, difficult rules regarding what charges are appropriate during infusions and issues related to “carve out periods.” Auditing systems can help clinicians comply with requirements, including simple-to-create functions which automatically flag missing stop times.

As readers will doubtless know, getting competing health systems to engage in “coopetition” can be tough, even if it helps them improve their operations. But given the need to combat post-EMR lags in revenue, maybe more of them will risk it in the future.